Top 100 Artists of the Decade: #21 Daft Punk

The Top 100 Artists of the Decade list will be posted over the course of 100 days. On September 23rd, we will post one artist and continue every day until December 31st, when we will unveil our #1 artist of the decade!

Daft Punk is probably the perfect gift for the holidays. Seriously, you can play their music at almost any event where dancing might occur, as long as it’s not polka or square dancing. Ignoring Daft Punk as one of the top artists is the same as ignoring the genre of house music they helped popularize. Sure, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy and DJ Shadow made it “cool” to listen to house music, but Daft Punk took it one step further. They were heard in our lives in every way imaginable, transcending boundaries in ways few artists can. Growing up they were played on hip hop radio stations before there was a mass media market for techno. “Around the World” was played at several Bar/Bat-mitzvahs I attended, not to mention clubs around the world. Their music recreated the techno song into a badass dance track with hip hop breaks, and funk or soul samples. Yes it was pop, and yes it was overplayed, but with all reasons to push it away, you still couldn’t eliminate the urge to put Daft Punk on “one more time.”